Minecraft Gameplay
Minecraft is a three-dimensional sandbox game that has no specific goals for the player to accomplish, allowing players a great amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game.13 However, there is an achievement system.14 Gameplay by default is first person, but players have the option to play in third person mode.15 The core gameplay revolves around breaking and placing blocks. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes—arranged in a fixed grid pattern and representing different materials, such as dirt, stone, various ores, water, lava, tree trunks, etc. While players can move freely across the world, objects can only be placed at fixed locations on the grid. Players can gather these material blocks and place them elsewhere, thus allowing for various constructions.16 At the start of the game, the player is placed on the surface of a procedurally generated and virtually infinite game world.17 The world is divided into biomes ranging from deserts to jungles to snowfields.1819 Players can walk across the terrain consisting of plains, mountains, forests, caves, and various water bodies.17 The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting 20 real-time minutes. Throughout the course of the game, players encounter various non-player characters known as mobs, including animals, villagers and hostile creatures.20 Non-hostile animals—such as cows, pigs, and chickens—can be hunted for food and crafting materials, and spawn in the daytime. By contrast, hostile mobs—such as large spiders, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places, such as caves.17 Some Minecraft-unique creatures have been noted by reviewers, such as the Creeper, an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player; and the Enderman, a creature with the ability to teleport and pick up blocks.21 A few of the hostile monsters displayed in Minecraft from left to right: Zombie, Spider, Enderman, Creeper, Skeleton The game world is procedurally generated as players explore it, using a map seed which is obtained from the system clock at the time of world creation unless manually specified by the player.2223 Although there are limits on movement up and down, Minecraft allows for an infinitely large game world to be generated on the horizontal plane, only running into technical problems when extremely distant locations are reached.1 The game achieves this by splitting the game world data into smaller sections called "chunks", which are only created or loaded into memory when players are nearby.22 The game's physics system has often been described by commentators as unrealistic.24 Most solid blocks are not affected by gravity. Liquids flow from a source block, which can be removed by placing a solid block in its place, or by scooping it into a bucket. Complex systems can be built using primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates built with an in-game material known as redstone.25 Minecraft features two alternate dimensions besides the main world—the Nether and the End.21 The Nether is a hell-like dimension accessed via player-built portals that contains many unique resources and can be used to travel great distances in the overworld.26 The End is a barren land in which a boss dragon called the Ender Dragon dwells.27 Killing the dragon cues the game's ending credits, written by Irish author Julian Gough.28 Players are then allowed to teleport back to their original spawn point in the overworld, and will receive the "The End" achievement. There is also a second boss called "The Wither", which upon defeat drops a specific material needed to build a placeable beacon that can enhance certain abilities of all nearby players. The game primarily consists of four game modes: survival, creative, adventure, and spectator. It also has a changeable difficulty system of four levels; the easiest difficulty (peaceful) prevents hostile creatures from spawning.29 Survival mode The Minecraft crafting screen, showing the crafting pattern of two stone axes In this mode, players have to gather natural resources (such as wood and stone) found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items.17 Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring the player to build a shelter at night.17 The mode also features a health bar which is depleted by attacks from monsters, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game, except in "Peaceful" difficulty, in which the hunger bar does not drain. If the hunger bar is depleted, automatic healing will stop and eventually health will deplete. Health replenishes when players have a nearly full hunger bar, and also regenerates regardless of fullness if players play on the "Peaceful" difficulty. There are a wide variety of items that players can craft in Minecraft.30 Players can craft armour, which can help mitigate damage from attacks, while weapons such as swords can be crafted to kill enemies and other animals more easily. Players may acquire resources to craft tools, such as axes, shovels, or pickaxes, used to chop down trees, dig soil, and mine ores, respectively; tools made of iron perform their tasks more quickly than tools made of stone or wood and can be used more heavily before they break. Players may also trade goods with villager mobs through a bartering system involving trading emeralds for different goods.31 Villagers often trade with emeralds, wheat or other materials.2031 The game has an inventory system, and players can carry a limited number of items. Upon dying, items in the players' inventories are dropped, and players re-spawn at the current spawn point, which is set by default where players begin the game, but can be reset if players sleep in a bed.32 Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn. Players may acquire experience points by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, breeding animals, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armour and weapons.29 Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects.29 Hardcore mode Players may also play in hardcore mode, this being a variant of survival mode that differs primarily in the game being locked to the hardest gameplay setting as well as featuring permanent death; upon players' death, their world is deleted.33 When a player dies on a server set to hardcore mode, the player is banned from that server. Creative mode An example of a creation constructed in Minecraft In creative mode, players have access to all of the resources and items in the game through the inventory menu, and can place or remove them instantly.34 Players, who are able to fly freely around the game world, do not take environmental or mob damage, and are not affected by hunger.3536 The game mode helps players focus on building and creating large projects.34 Adventure mode Adventure mode was added to Minecraft in version 1.3; it was designed specifically so that players could experience user crafted custom maps and adventures.373839 Gameplay is similar to survival mode but introduces various player restrictions, which can be applied to the game world by the creator of the map. This is so that players can obtain the required items and experience adventures in the way that the mapmaker intended.39 Another addition designed for custom maps is the command block; this block allows mapmakers to expand interactions with players through certain server commands.40 Spectator mode Spectator mode allows players to fly around through blocks and watch gameplay without interacting. In this mode, the hotbar becomes a menu that allows the player to teleport to players in the world. It is also possible to view from the point of view of another player or creature. Some things may look different from another creature's point of view.41 Multiplayer Multiplayer on Minecraft is available through player-hosted and business-hosted servers and enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world.42 Players can run their own servers or use a hosting provider. Single-player worlds have local area network support, allowing players to join worlds on locally interconnected computers without a server setup.43 Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players around. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed to enter the server.42 Multiplayer servers offer players a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. Player versus player (PvP) can also be enabled to allow fighting between players.44 Many servers today have custom plugins that enable the player and the server to do many different things that are not normally possible. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without the hassle of setting up their own.45 Realms varies from a standard server in that only invited players can join the server, and that they do not use a server IP. Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their realm; however, the server can only have ten people online at a time, and does not support user-made plugins. At announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, Realms will enable Minecraft to support cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android versions starting in June 2016, with Xbox One support to come later in 2016 and eventually support for virtual reality devices.46 Development Markus Persson, the original creator of Minecraft, at GDC in 2011 Markus "Notch" Persson began developing the game as a project.47 He was inspired to create Minecraft by several other games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper, and later Infiniminer. At the time, he had visualised an isometric 3D building game that would be a cross between his inspirations and had made some early prototypes.47 Infiniminer heavily influenced the style of gameplay, including the first-person aspect of the game, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements.48 Minecraft was first released to the public on 17 May 2009, as a developmental release on TIGSource forums,49 later becoming known as the Classic version. Further milestones dubbed as Survival Test, Indev and Infdev were released between September 2009 and February 2010, although the game saw updates in-between. The first major update, dubbed alpha version, was released on 28 June 2010. Although Persson maintained a day job with Jalbum.net at first, he later quit in order to work on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version of the game expanded.50 Persson continued to update the game with releases distributed to users automatically. These updates included features such as new items, new blocks, new mobs, survival mode, and changes to the game's behaviour (e.g., how water flows).50 To back the development of Minecraft, Persson set up a video game company, Mojang, with the money earned from the game.515253 On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft was entering its beta testing phase on 20 December 2010.54 He further stated that users who bought the game after this date would no longer be guaranteed to receive all future content free of charge as it "scared both the lawyers and the board." However, bug fixes and all updates leading up to and including the release would still be free. Over the course of the development, Mojang hired several new employees to work on the project.55 Mojang moved the game out of beta and released the full version on 18 November 2011.56 The game has been continuously updated since the release, with changes ranging from new game content to new server hosts.57 On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead developer.58 On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced that they had hired the developers of the popular server platform "CraftBukkit"44 to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications.59 This acquisition also included Mojang apparently taking full ownership of the CraftBukkit modification,60 although the validity of this claim was questioned due to its status as an open-source project with many contributors, licensed under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License.61 On 15 September 2014, Microsoft announced a $2.5 billion deal to buy Mojang, along with the ownership of the Minecraft intellectual property. The deal was suggested by Persson when he posted a tweet asking a corporation to buy his share of the game after receiving criticism for "trying to do the right thing." It was completed on 6 November 2014, and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires".6263646566 Audio Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German sound designer Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld.67 The background music in Minecraft is non-lyrical ambient music. On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game.68 The video game blog Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011.69 On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which includes the music that was added in later versions of the game.7071 A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by acclaimed indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015.7273